Affan Syed, National University of Computer and Emerging Sciences, Pakistan

Niki Trigoni, Oxford University

Geoffrey Werner-Challen, SUNY Buffalo

Kamin Whitehouse, University of Virginia

Guoliang Xing, Michigan State

Hongwei Zhang, Wayne State University

Marco Zuniga, Delft University of Technology

Pei Zhang, Carnegie Mellon University Silicon Valley

Shadow Program Committee (New for IPSN 2015!)

In order to train the next generation of program committee (PC) members and as an educational experience to expose students to the peer review process, the organizers of IPSN 2015 have made the submitted papers available to a shadow PC. This has allowed students and others who are interested in future PC services to read submitted papers and to go through the reviewing process, and ultimately arriving at a shadow conference program. This has been an opportunity for future PC members to learn about the peer-review process and to gain experiences as a reviewer. The shadow PC did not have access to the real reviews, the names of the real reviewers, or any other data (e.g. relative rankings). They had to abide by the same rules and restrictions applicable to the regular PC members including rules against discussing the papers outside of the PC context, or using in any way results from reviewed papers before such papers have been published. Making a submitted paper available to the shadow PC was optional; authors had the opportunity to opt-in during the paper submission process. Shadow reviews for papers that were reviewed by the shadow PC have been sent out after the actual IPSN 2015 review process. Although, the shadow PC has made own accept and reject decisions and constructed own program, the main benefit to the authors has been the additional feedback from a different set of researchers. We have shared these reviews with the authors, and we hope the authors will find the reviews helpful to improve their work.

A total of 41 papers opted to the shadow PC program. The shadow PC consisted of 13 Computer Science PhD students from eight different
universities from the US and abroad. In the first round of review, each shadow PC member reviewed 9-11 papers and in the second round 1-2 papers.
Nine of the shadow PC members met physically at the University of Houston campus and the rest called in to collectively understand and discuss the merits of each paper. Based on the initial feedback, the shadow PC has been a tremendously useful experience as they make progress in their career. We would like to thank our shadow PC members for enabling this experience: